Category: Podcasts

Podcast: Managing an Engineering Team at a Startup

KP Naidu is the SVP of Engineering and CTO at Amava. KP is an accomplished Technology Leader, highly recognized for his technology vision, engineering and execution and has over 30 years of experience in technology.

KP, is an Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics expert from The University of Edinburgh, UK and rose early in his career to very high ranks at Sun Microsystems, where he was a VP responsible for their global Data Center Practice.

Podcast: AI-powered customer experiences

Ravi N. Raj is the CEO and Co-founder of Passage.AI. In this role, he leads a team of AI and deep learning engineers that have created the industry-leading AI platform that businesses can use to create a conversational interface for their websites.

Before co-founding Passage.AI, he led product for @WalmartLabs, Walmart’s hub for innovation around social, mobile and retail. Raj came to Walmart through the acquisition of Kosmix, where he served as the VP and GM of Kosmix’s sites, which included Kosmix.com, Tweetbeat.com, and RightHealth.com, then the second largest health site on the Web.

Raj has also played leadership roles at Yahoo, AltaVista, and Elance (now Upwork) and hold patents in search, social media, and retail.

Podcast: Building an Equitable Data Economy

Swish Goswami, 24, is the CEO of Surf, a tech company providing brands a better way to engage and understand consumers while compensating consumers for their data. Surf’s revolutionary browser extension passively rewards people for their everyday browsing and helps them save when shopping with their favorite brands. Surf’s brand division provides high fidelity data and commerce enablement opportunities to some of the world’s biggest brands like Netflix, NBA, Sony Music, L’Oreal, Electronic Arts, etc. Surf’s vision is to build an equitable data economy and the company has made two acquisitions and raised over $5M to date (from several NBA players, unicorn founders and venture firms).

Swish has given three TEDx talks, secured a publishing deal with Kogan Page and a sneaker deal with K-Swiss, and set up an angel fund called AGEX Capital. Through AGEX, he is an advisor/investor in popular social companies like FaZe Clan, Wombo, and Upstream. Swish has a personal following of over 200,000 and enjoys speaking around the world under North America’s prestigious bureau Speakers Spotlight. For his entrepreneurial and philanthropic achievements, Swish was inducted into Plan Canada’s Top 20 under 20 and Bay Street Bull’s 30 under 30, recognized as LinkedIn’s Top Voice and Startup Canada’s Young Entrepreneur of the Year and awarded the United Nation’s Outstanding Youth Leadership award.

Podcast: What if Privacy Had an API?

Anshu Sharma is the Co-founder and CEO of Skyflow besides being a serial entrepreneur and angel investor. He co-founded Clearedin where he serves as Executive Chairman, and Suki, a digital assistant for doctors. Prior, he served as venture partner at Storm Ventures and was vice president of platform at Salesforce.

Anshu has invested in over 25 startups including Nutanix, Algolia, Workato, and RazorPay.

Podcast: New Customers: a Fierce Competition Between Large and Small Banks

Laurence Cooke is the founder and CEO of nanopay Corporation, a technology company that offers business-to-business payments and liquidity management solutions to businesses and financial institutions. Active in the payments community, Laurence is a member of the Payments Canada Stakeholder Advisory Committee, FinPay and the US Federal Reserve Faster Payments Task Force.  Previously, he was VP of Wireless at Shaw Communications and COO of Bell Mobility.

Prior to starting nanopay, Laurence worked with WIND Canada and was Vice President of Wireless at Shaw Communications Inc. He was also Chief Operating Officer of Bell Mobility and Bell Distribution Inc (BDI), where he was responsible for all of Bell Mobility’s operations and led a team of 9,000 employees. At BDI, Laurence was responsible for all retail for Bell Canada.  Prior to joining Bell, Laurence was a senior executive in Accenture’s London Strategy Practice. Laurence co-founded two wireless data businesses in Europe, Melodeo, Inc. and Xtempus.

Podcast: Building a One-stop Shop for Real Estate

Tyler Baldwin is Chief Executive Officer at Reali, a real estate and fintech company streamlining the homeownership journey. A strategic go-to-market leader with extensive experience successfully launching global products at scale, Tyler is an operation and tech veteran who brings a unique skill set and perspective to Reali.

With a strong background in blending sales, operations, and corporate strategy, Baldwin joined Reali as Chief Revenue Officer and was promoted to COO before becoming CEO. Prior to joining Reali, Baldwin was an executive at LinkedIn and led Elevate’s Mid-Market and Enterprise sales team, an employee advocacy solution that helps companies build their brand.

Podcast: Remote Visual Assistance: Democratizing Access to Expertise

Gary York is a serial entrepreneur with four successful software and services exits: three private sales and one IPO. He has spent his career at the boundary of what is possible and what is practical. He has held technical and executive positions with leading technology companies in Boston, Silicon Valley, and Alabama. Not only is Gary a winner of the Smithsonian Innovation Award and the EDPA Lifetime Achievement Award for Innovation, he also serves on the Boards of TechBirmingham, the McWane Science Center and Urban Avenues.

He holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon and was a visiting fellow at UC Berkeley. Gary and his wife Cathy have two children. He is an avid runner.

Podcast: You Have Too Much Software

James Layfield is an entrepreneur and investor creating positive change through innovation in sectors ranging from property to financial technology. Most recently, James co-founded Clearfind, an easy-to-use, unbiased artificial intelligence platform that is changing the way companies manage and optimize software with data. James is a general partner in a fintech investment fund Treasury with the cofounders of Acorns, Betterment, and a board member of Paypal, and has angel investments across a host of technology ventures.

James has founded and led multiple successful companies including Rise, the world’s largest fintech innovation platform, with Barclays; Never Ever Limited, an innovation catalyst and consulting agency; and Central Working, a shared workspace hub for business professionals. James is currently an ambassador for CognitionX the AI event, London and Partners, and the ScaleUp Institute. He also serves as the New York Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London.

Podcast: Ending Email Overwhelm

Prasanth Nair is an internationally acclaimed productivity expert. He believes that productive people do better things for themselves, their organizations, their families, and the world. He is the creator of the Stack Method, the world’s preeminent email processing technique, available for free at www.stackmethod.com.

Through his firm, Double Gemini, Prasanth teaches his email, meeting, and time management strategies to organizations across the globe. Outside of work, Prasanth is a father of four kids, and in his ever shrinking spare time, enjoys endurance training and triathlons.

Podcast: AI That Delivers Explainable Decisions-as-a-Service

Gary Saarenvirta is Daisy’s founder and CEO and a preeminent authority on artificial intelligence. The former head of IBM Canada’s data mining and data warehousing practices, Gary is passionate about AI and its ability to transform how retailers and insurers grow their businesses and establish an edge in an increasingly challenging and competitive environment.

Under Gary’s leadership, Daisy has established a track record of delivering verifiable financial outcomes for a rapidly growing list of global clients.

Podcast: Using Technology to Build a Bank for All

Deep Varma is the CTO of Varo. He has more than 20 years of Silicon Valley experience creating consumer-focused products, developing platform experiences that use artificial intelligence and big data, and building world-class engineering teams.

His experience includes companies like IBM, Yahoo!, Trulia/Zillow, and over 5 years of startup experience. He is leading Varo’s Technology teams to build Technology Bank from the ground-up to scale to millions of customers. He holds a Masters’ degree and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

Podcast: Bigger Opportunities Are Waiting for You

Jennifer Wilde draws on over 15 years of hands-on experience developing strategies for fostering innovation during emergencies in volatile contexts, and excels in bringing together diverse, innovative groups to collaborate on problems and big opportunities.

Dan MCClure is a specialist in disruption. Throughout his 40 year career, he has been a choreographer of ambitious messy change, reimagining complex systems in business, international aid, and society as a whole.

After working with Fortune 500 companies, governments and some of the world’s largest non-profits, Jenny and Dan, both Managing Directors at Innovation Ecosystem, are looking to share some of their insights into how all types of businesses need to think outside the box to solve problems.

Podcast: Free the Developers Using NoCode

Angela Castillo is a seasoned executive with experience scaling hyper-growth companies including marketing technology powerhouse, Drift. She has vast expertise in Brand Development, the usage of technology for marketing, and bringing products to consumers both internationally and in the U.S.

Angela speaks 3 languages and holds a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and Advertising from CEU University of Valencia, Spain, and an MBA from Babson College, Boston USA.

Podcast: AI-Driven Future of Remote Sales

Andrew Levy is the co-founder and CEO of Aircover, a venture-backed company focused on real-time, in-meeting sales tools and intelligence. He has been in the analytics space for over 15 years. He previously was the co-founder/CEO of Crittercism, renamed Apteligent, acquired by VMware.

At its peak, Crittercism was deployed on close to a billion devices worldwide. At VMware he led end-user computing analytics & automation. Andrew is a YC and AngelPad alum, and has a BS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.